Episode 112. Part 3

From RPGnet
Jump to: navigation, search

Jump to:






Back at our ship, Christian sets himself at our ramp. He’s done up pretty and he’s set to Bark, drumming up business in the way of passengers and cargo. Arden hangs about, watching the ebb and flow of the Docks passing by, curious and taking everything in. Christian posts a sign saying we’re heading Rim-ward.

Eventually an older woman in her apparent fifties approaches, looking a bit uneasy to be in this part of town. She stops before Christian and speaks to him, her voice hesitant and wary. Christian switches gears to be as soothing and unthreatening as possible.

Woman: You’re heading to the Rim?
Christian: We are, ma’am.
Woman: Would that be to Blue Sun or Kalidasa?
Christian: We are more likely to be headed toward the Kalidasa System.
Woman: Ah. I am looking for passage for myself and my assistant, and some cargo. Christian: All right.

She hesitates and Christian encouragingly nods: please continue.

Woman: Ah…we’ve had some people…how shall I say this? they’ve objected to some of our cargo, so I don’t want to...ah…take you along too far until I’m sure you’re okay with this. Um, I’d be willing to treat the cargo as though it was more passengers, though I understand that costs more. There’d effectively be roughly two of those containers.

She gestures toward two containers visible on the outside of our ship.

Woman: (continuing) That’s probably how much space we’d take up with our gear…and cages.

Cages? Christian suppresses a blink.

Christian: And what sort of cargo would this be?
Woman: They are…apes.
Christian: Apes.
Woman: Six apes.
Christian: Are you a research scientist?

The woman relaxes a bit at the question.

Woman: Yes. I’m Dr. Nova Taylor. I am a primatologist.

Oh. Okay. Christian senses Dr. Taylor is nervous about something but it’s hard to pin down why.

Taylor: We need to get to Verbena. Well, not to Verbena but to Lassek, the moon. It’s a..preserve.
Christian: You just didn’t have a ’wave on the Cortex, did you?
Taylor: (pleased) Oh, yes! We’ve advertised on the Cortex as well.
Christian: Oh, yes, I see…
Taylor: (enthusiastic) Then perhaps you know of the cargo.
Christian: Well I know it said ‘livestock’ and there would be two handlers.
Taylor: Oh, yes. We weren’t sure what to call it on the …thing…but there won’t be any trouble. They are quite easy to manage.
Christian: You said…chimpanzees? gorillas?
Taylor: There’s actually three gorillas and three orangutans.
Christian: Interesting.

Christian checks his instincts, finds them quiescent. The woman seems on the up and up.

Taylor: If I understand correctly, the normal passengers on a journey like this—I’m not sure how much it would cost, but we can pay up to 2000 credits for this.

Christian does the calculations in his head. It’s an 18-day trip to Verbena from here. 2000 is a little over 100 credits a day to transport that cargo. In contrast to the standard 25 credits per week, this is a substantial windfall. A fortune, even.

So…where’s the catch?

Christian: Well, that’s very generous. (smiles) Welcome aboard. Do you need to arrive before a specific time?
Taylor: It would probably be best if we leave as soon as you’re free, but we can wait a couple of days. We would need to transfer things from the Institute.
Christian: I am going to have to ask for the money up front. You can pay us once you’re on the ship and before we take off.
Taylor: That can be arranged.
Christian: Thank you. In that case, you can bring your cargo by.

Christian gives Taylor the Gift’s ’wave information.

Christian: Call ahead to make sure someone’s here when you bring your cargo by, and we’ll arrange it for you. Will you be needing separate quarters or shared quarters?
Taylor: Either is fine. Actually, we’re often out in the field and we’re not used to…(she gestures at the ship and it’s comforts). We’re used to unusual circumstances.
Christian: I understand. We do have other passengers, so it will be very likely be double bunks. Very good. We will see you then.

They shake on the deal and Taylor leaves. Christian mentally shuffles things around aboard our ship, placing Taylor’s cargo in the containers on the upper deck. If Taylor truly cares for her primates as she seemed, the proximity will be welcome for her and her charges. Christian and Arden stay outside a little longer, just in case another business opportunity comes along, but really—Taylor’s already made our rent and then some. The men quit the Docks without taking on any more jobs.

Christian doffs his Barker’s finery and heads to the galley to prepare our dinner of protein paste and it’s not long after that he hears the hiss of the airlock come up the main stairs. Hurried steps on the treads follow and he ducks out of the galley to see what’s going on.

Miss Tolson rushes in, out of breath and showing signs of agitation. Christian sighs.

Christian: Who has her?
Miss Tolson: I don’t know. She disappeared.

Oh, shit.

Christian: (gusts a bigger sigh) All right. Sit down a moment. I’ll get the others. We’ll see what we can do. Where did she disappear?
Miss Tolson: Well, she was… She wanted to make a ’wave to some family she has out here. And…so we went out to look around and it was fine. And then, we were standing there and some guy literally just shoved her into a van. (quietly) And that’s the last I saw her.
Christian: All right. Wait here. Write down every detail you can remember about the van and the people.

Christian goes to the bridge and hails Nika on the comm.

Nika, Rina, Mike and Omar are just finishing up an absolutely wonderful meal at Mama Liu’s, with nary an uneaten dumpling in sight, when Nika jumps and slaps a hand to her hip. Her comm’s buzzing.

Nika: (drawling) Yeah?
Christian: Good news. We have two passengers with cargo and they are going to pay us a fair amount of money for passage to Verbena.
Nika: Fabulous!
Christian: Bad news is—one of the girls is missing.
Nika: Excuse me?

Around the table, the rest of us put down our chopsticks and straighten up.

Christian: She’s been kidnapped.
Nika: Excuse me?
Christian: You heard me the first time.
Rina: (C’mon, tell me) What?
Nika: By whom?
Christian: We don’t know. A man in a van.
Nika: Get better details. We’re on our way.
Christian: I’m working on them now.

Nika hisses a curse and cuts the channel.

Rina: Nika? What?
Nika: We’ve got tape, we’ve got lots of duct tape, right?
Rina: I’m sure. (splays her hands) What?
Nika: Duct tape them to the bunk and never let them out again.
Rina: Who?

Nika rises from the table and looks at Omar.

Nika: Omar, old friend of Rina and Michael. Who trafficks in girls in this area?
Rina: Oh, fuck me! Don’t tell me.

Omar raises his brows at this, but recovers.

Omar: None of the people I’m associated with.
Nika: One of our passengers just got picked up off the street. About twenty minutes ago.
Rina: Omar, get on the horn with Ginny. She would know.
Omar: I’ll look into it. I don’t think that she’d…I mean—
Nika: We’re not in any way intimating that anyone you know would be involved. An accidental snatch of a passenger, you know, not a big problem. But it would be really nice if you could get us a lead from someone you know on where she might be.

Nika gives Omar a description of Emma as she and Rina gather the leftovers into boxes.

Nika: (continuing) Do you mind if we excuse ourselves a little early from lunch?

Rina turns around and hails the young man behind the counter.

Rina: Hey, Jimmy? Could we get another dozen of these to go? Thanks.

The men trade looks and Mike rises with a nod: Nice seein’ ya. Nika is already out the door and on the street. Resigning the rest of the day into the shitter, Rina grabs the food and follows Nika, and Mike brings up the rear.

Meanwhile, back on the ship, Arden and Christian try to debrief Miss Tolson. She’s trying but she’s kinda panicked at the moment. Arden gives her something to calm her down and they continue when she’s more coherent.

Miss Tolson: It was…maybe 30 minutes after she waved her family—or friends, I’m not sure exactly, she said, ‘her people’— and…
Arden: (gently) Did you listen to the conversation she had?
Miss Tolson: (sighing) No, not really.
Arden: Do you remember where the pay phone was?
Miss Tolson: Yeah…We were in this wonderful market…(wonderingly) It was kinda like the market back on Parth. But it was different. The smells and the sounds and the people were alive and … and I remember there was a guy who had birds, crazy parrots and things like that. Um…we were getting some food that she likes, it was common to this planet, a thing called…what was it called—Patty? Pad tie? Something like that.… and it was noodles, peanuts and noodles, and…
Arden: Mmmm, Thai. Pad Thai.

Miss Tolson flashes him a quick smile and continues.

Miss Tolson: Um, then she stopped to make the ’wave and… she said she knew somebody here—
Arden: She knew somebody here? On Persephone?

But Emma said her family’s from Londinium. Something isn’t jiving, here.

Miss Tolson: She said she had family…or friends or something, it wasn’t exactly clear.
Arden: So she made the ’wave and you started walking back and along the way…?
Miss Tolson: (shaking her head) Well, we were waiting at the—
Arden: What were you waiting for?
Miss Tolson: Well…her friend, or her family…or her people, to show up. And at first we thought that’s who it was in the van, but then they grabbed her and that was the last we saw of her.
Arden: What was her expression when the van pulled over?
Miss Tolson: Well, when the guy grabbed her….she was…
Arden: She screamed…?
Miss Tolson: Yes. She was alarmed.
Arden: Okay. You don’t have any idea who she was trying to contact?
Miss Tolson: She said, ‘her people’.
Arden: ‘Her people’.
Miss Tolson: The van was like…a local delivery van of some kind.
Arden: Did it have a logo on the side?
Miss Tolson: Yeah…
Christian: Wheels or hover?
Miss Tolson: Wheels. It was a…like a…

She shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head, trying to remember. Arden gives her pencil and paper so she can sketch it.

Miss Tolson: Could you, like, deliver sheets and stuff? Napkins?
Christian: Yes.
Miss Tolson: Who delivers napkins?
Christian: Laundry services.
Miss Tolson: Yeah…. .

Christian pulls up the Cortex, gets a list of all the laundry services in the area—a city of over 6 million people, no less—and has Miss Tolson look through it to find a match for the logo she’s drawn. This list numbers in the hundreds.

That’s a lot of napkins.

Arden tries to figure out where the restaurant was where the maid put in her phone call. All we know is it’s within the running distance of a softly-raised 17-year-old girl. If we can retrace the girls’ steps through the market, find the pay phone and then expand out to include laundries within the radius of the snatch point, we might have a way of finding Emma and bringing her back.

That’s a lot of if.

While Christian sits with Miss Tolson and waits for the others to come back, Arden goes to a private room of the ship and calls his investigator friend, Terry Gibbs. Gibbs is wiling to take on the case.

Gibbs: Yeah, give me the details on her and I’ll track her in. It doesn’t sound like this is a slave thing or something like that. It sounds like it’s something more personal. That phone call sounds like it’s the significant thing, it’s probably somebody she knows. Or think she knows.
Arden: You’re welcome to come by the ship and talk to the witness if you want to. You probably know the questions to ask better than I do.

Meanwhile, Christian is watching over Miss Tolson and the rest of us make it back to the ship. When Arden returns from making his call, Nika reaches over and gives his head a swat. No explanation given, but Nika’s holding the package he’d sent her when she does.

A little later Gibbs shows up on our doorstep. Clad in a trenchcoat and of Middle Eastern descent, he exudes an antique hard-boiled charm, a Humphrey Bogart filtered through Old Egypt. We settle in the passenger lounge and Gibbs gets right to business.

Gibbs: So, tell me about this girl.

We fill him in. The girls went sightseeing, took in a meal at a restaurant whereupon the maid wanted to call her people. About twenty minutes later, a laundry van comes up and the maid is snatched. As far as what Emma had meant by ‘her people’, we speculate that maybe she has family on Persephone. Christian’s of the mind that Emma is originally from Persephone and that this is either a genuine kidnapping or a staged kidnapping.

Nika: Check the Cortex and review the report family has out on Hilde and the maid. It’s got to have more information on the girl than we’ve got.

Actually, it doesn’t. We check it and there’s no mention of the maid at all, beyond the statement that the missing Tolson daughter might be ‘traveling with a companion’. It looks like servants are invisible to these people.

Rina: Is there a way we could legally—No, there’s no legal way to hack into the public phone logs and see who she called.
Gibbs: No legal way that I know of.
Rina: And we need to canvas the restaurant staff.
Arden: That’s why I called Terry. He’s a private detective, here, in the city.
Christian: Why don’t we let the private detective tell us what to do?
Rina: I understand that. And we need to ID the truck.
Christian: I was working on ID-ing the company the truck came from.
Gibbs: I’ll go look around at the restaurant and see what I can find.

Business concluded, Gibbs slaps his hat on and leaves. When the airlock is shut behind him, Nika turns to the rest of the crew.

Nika: I’ve determined, by the way, that when they return, they are duct taped into their quarters.
Mike: Well, hold on, now…they are paying passengers.
Rina: Oh, boy, and we are paying, yes.
Nika: And paying and paying.
Christian: Speaking of which, it turns out we will be taking on that livestock job after all.
Rina: Please, not bees.
Nika: What kind of livestock?

We mount the stairs to the upper deck.

Christian: Apes. Gorillas and Orangutans.

Rina stops dead on the stairs and points a finger at Christian.

Rina: All right. If we’re taking those, you’re going to be the one hosing the ape shit out of the containers.
Arden: No, it’s fine. They’ll have handlers. Two of them.
Rina: (somewhat mollified) Do we have to feed them?
Christian: No.
Rina: They’re bringing their own food supplies?
Arden and Christian together: Yes.
Rina: Excellent.

We complete the journey upstairs and flop in the passenger lounge again. Christian fills Rina and Nika in on the job.

Christian: A research scientist and her assistant. And they’re paying two thousand credits. For passage to Verbena.
Rina: Whoa.
Arden: There’s this phrase: If something’s too good to be true—
All of us: —it probably is.

But two thousand credits is so very hard to turn down.

Arden: Her name is Dr. Nova Taylor.
Christian: It doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve never heard of her.
Rina: It’s probably an alias.
Christian: It could be.
Mike: (laughing) You’d ‘never heard of her’. Out of all the people in the entire Universe…

Yeah, right, Christian. What are the odds? Jeez.

Nika just looks at the others and shakes her head.

Nika: I realize we’ve had a run of extremely bad luck, here, but paranoia doesn’t necessarily have to be a way of life for us.
Christian: Honestly? I. Don’t. Care.
Nika: I care if, and only if, this is a freakin’ illegal cargo.
Christian: I’ve already asked her if she has the proper papers for transporting livestock.
Nika:(Exactly!) Thank you.
Christian: She advertised on the Cortex, so I imagine she must.
Arden: No, she advertised on the Cortex as it being livestock. She didn’t say anything about what kind of livestock.
Christian: Transporting any kind of livestock off-planet would be illegal without proper papers.
Rina: Aren’t there laws defining agricultural animals? Who eats apes?
Christian: Actually, there are a couple of societies that—

Oh, gross! Nika nips this one in the bud.

Nika: Guys. Ask about the papers.
Christian: Yes. And she’ll be paying when she boards.
Nika: She’s paying two thousand credits up front? (Hinked!) They’re stolen.

Meaning the cargo.

Christian: If she decided to come and free these monkeys from—
Nika: Just make sure she has papers, because if we get stopped for any reason we can honestly say “Talk to her. She’s got papers.” I want plausible deniability.

And since that’s decided, there’s nothing left to do but to sit by the phone and wait for further developments on Emma’s kidnapping. Of course, we pass the time by talking about it. Was Emma snatched by slavers and sex traffickers? Lord knows, this area’s already got evidence it supports both. Maybe it was just a crime of opportunity by amateurs: they saw Emma, decided she was pretty, and so they snatched her. Maybe the kidnappers were after Miss Tolson and grabbed the wrong girl by mistake? They don’t look that much alike, but it could happen. Maybe it’s a convoluted scheme to snatch the maid in order to force an exchange for her more lucrative mistress. At which point in our speculations, Mike speaks up for the first time.

Mike: My hunch is: I don’t know how well you know these girls—
Nika: We don’t.
Mike: —but my feeling is either this girl had some problems and that’s why she left initially and those problems came back to get her or, more likely, this is a scam trying to get her rich friend to pay ransom.
Christian: Her rich friend doesn’t have any money and her family wouldn’t give it to her.
Mike: I don’t know. Does the maid know that?
Christian: Yes. I would imagine she does.

Given the situation between the girls, nope, the family isn’t likely going to pay to get the maid back. As for the maid herself…

Christian: Either she’s a very very good actor, and I’m talking about trained-in-the-guild good, or she really genuinely cares. That doesn’t mean this still isn’t a scam. You can still care about someone and pull something like this off. But I can’t believe that she would be so naïve as to—
Nika: How much time have you spent with her?
Christian: With them? They’ve been aboard for weeks. A fair amount of time.
Nika: Christian, you read people better than anyone I’ve ever met. How much time did you actually spend in proximity with them? Did you ever get anything off of her that indicated she might in fact be up to something?
Christian: Enough time to see that there was a genuine affection between them. I think that the maid was more worldly-wise in understanding what was going on, but I never got the idea that she was being duplicitous.
Mike: She had multiple reasons for wanting to leave.
Christian: Yes, there was more than one reason. And at the time, it made sense because she was probably being forced to give sexual favors to somebody. Very likely Hilde’s father.
Nika: Which was, in fact, the truth? As far as you can tell?
Christian: The fear when she said it was relatively real enough and with my knowledge of her situation and of the family— Arden: Insofar as her motives are concerned, it really doesn’t matter. We need to find her, first. Once we determine where she is, then her motives come into play on whether or not we want to do anything about it.
Christian: Either way, I seriously doubt that she would be foolish enough to believe that Hilde’s family will pay ransom for a servant. Even if Hilde asked them to.
Arden: Convictions will persuade you to do things not readily apparent.
Christian: Hilde, do you have money that you haven’t told us about?
Hilde: Well…I’ve got the jewelry.
Christian: How much is it worth?

Miss Tolson fetches that purse and shows everyone the jewelry. Christian does his best to estimate the worth. The jewelry is really hard to appraise without a trained jeweler. But based on the fact they came with a fairly expensive car, it’s a good guess we’re talking several thousand credits. Christian says it’s a lot of money, but not enough for a ransom and besides, had money been the object, Emma had the opportunity to walk off with the jewelry anytime she wanted to once we’d taken her off Parth. And yet she hadn’t.

As for Emma’s mysterious ‘people’…

Christian: Hilde, did Emma make her call out of earshot? Were you there when she made the call? Did you see who she called?
Miss Tolson: I was there but I was in the restaurant.
Nika: How soon after she made the call did this happen?
Miss Tolson: About twenty-five, twenty minutes.
Nika: My thought process is she called somebody and she probably didn’t even know that they were going to snatch her off the street.
Arden: Probably not. There was either some duplicitous scam—.

At which point, Christian takes Miss Tolson into another room out of earshot of what Arden is saying and continues to question her without cross talk from the others.

Christian: Do you remember anything about what she said in the course of her conversation?
Miss Tolson: Just that she wanted to….
Christian: Did she say anything about the people she was talking to? Did she say they were her family?
Miss Tolson: She called them her people and it seemed like they were her family, but…sometimes I don’t understand the way she talks all the time.
Christian: Have you two ever talked about her past? From before she came to work for you?
Miss Tolson: She was very young when she came to work for us. She was just a kid like me, we were best friends.
Christian: Six? Seven? Ten? Thirteen…?
Miss Tolson: I think…yeah, I was four or five, so she was six or seven when she came to work for us. Well, she didn’t come to work for us when her parents did. Only her mother came to work for us.
Christian: Is her mother still there?
Miss Tolson: No, her mother died.
Christian: I see. Interesting. And what was her mother? Your governess?
Miss Tolson: Her mother worked at the Osiris house. And I think her main job was in the kitchen.
Christian: All right. We are going to do everything we can to get her back. You are going to stay on the ship. I know it’s hard, I know you want to go look for her but you are going to stay on the ship. That is the best thing you can do for her right now.

Christian gets her settled and goes to find the rest of us to fill us in.

And while Christian was getting this information out of Miss Tolson, Arden was laying down some theories of his own. For instance, that maybe Emma had been part of a scam from the first, but over the course of getting to know Miss Tolson had suffered a change of heart.

Arden: So the plan went awry, and the people at the other end don’t agree or don’t want to agree… We’ll find out.
Nika: I’ll give you that as a possibility only if they had been pushing us to go to Persephone at all, and they have not. We landed here strictly by chance, when we could have landed somewhere else.

And when Christian fills us in and we share our speculations, Nika’s of the mind that when Emma called her people, the reaction at the other end of the line was “Oh, my God, she’s finally home...” and that maybe Emma’s mother was running from someone from Persephone. And Christian cuts in with a theory of his own: For all we know, maybe Emma is nobility on the run and she’s just been taken back by her family. She could be an heiress, or promised to an arranged marriage. Any number of things.

Rina is struck by an idea and quickly texts Omar a message. As she’s doing that the theories start flying fast and furious…and getting a touch out there in terms of plausibility. Even if Emma is of the nobility and even if her mother was a noblewoman on the run, there’s no way to check for Emma’s family by her name: Emma Vail might very well be an alias and given the absence of the woman herself, we have no way of finding out her real name. Even if we were to search under the name of “Vail”, we’d have to include variants of the name…and we’d have no guarantee that we’d be barking up the right tree.

But we have to start somewhere.

Jump to:

Back to Season One: Foundations
Back to EPISODES
Back to Mutineers Homepage